Week Eleven

I really like the very first paragraph of the ‘Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion’ page. It says, “Accessibility, usability, and inclusion are closely related aspects in creating a web that works for everyone. Their goals, approaches, and guidelines overlap significantly. It is most effective to address them together when designing and developing websites and applications.” I think a lot of people think that those three things are the same; I know I wouldn’t have known the difference not too long ago. As an able-bodied person I never thought about website accessibility, that is, until recently. There was a story going around in the news about a man who was suing Dominos because their website wasn’t usable for him as a blind man. That raised my awareness on the issue, and then just a few days after I heard about this we started talking about accessibility in my Digital Inclusion class. We read articles on accessible and inclusive website design and we evaluated the accessibility of Blackboard. This made me think a lot about how the Internet isn’t very disability-friendly a lot of the time. Things I take for granted most of the time, like video captions, aren’t always available or accurate, which causes problems when users can’t hear or have trouble hearing. I’ve seen brief discussions on how to incorporate picture and video descriptions for people with vision impairments, but I think that’s something that is going to take a lot more work than captioning for hearing-impaired people. One of the things we read for Digital Inclusion was an article called “7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility.” I think it could be a good addition to the readings for this class. It gives a few simple suggestions on how to make websites more accessible, and my favorite thing about it is that the very first concept is “Accessibility is not a barrier to innovation.” The author goes on to say that making something accessible simply gives you constraints to think about while you’re working on your design, and I think that’s a great way to put it. As with ethics in algorithms and the discussion of moral/ethical training for programmers and other people, I think it would be a good idea to just train or teach everyone to always automatically incorporate accessibility features when designing new things instead of thinking of them as a setback or something extra they have to do.